Politics can be fun. I’m not necessarily talking about partisan politics, but politics in general. The internal machinations of any group of people when they come together to do anything is interesting to me.

For example, last week, Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, made an attempt to get a bill that was languishing in a committee to the floor of the West Virginia House of Delegates.

You might remember Steele as the former chairman of the House Government Organization Committee who challenged House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, for leadership of the House late last year. He lost that election in caucus in a 53-30 vote and lost his committee chairmanship after that. He now sits in the far corner of the House chamber, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still cause trouble for House leadership.

The bill that Steele tried to free was House Bill 2036, allowing for religious exemptions for vaccines. There has been yet another push in both the House and the state Senate to free residents from vaccine requirements in workplaces and higher education, or parents from the immunization requirements for public schools. So far, Republican leaders in both bodies have kept such bills off their committee agendas.

According to the state Department of Education, “West Virginia has one of the most effective school-entry vaccine preventable laws in the nation.” Children entering the public school system must be immunized against chickenpox, hepatitis-b, measles, meningitis, mumps, diphtheria, polio, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough.

There are exemptions, but they are pretty narrow. But some Republicans — especially after our current COVID-19 situation — have been trying to expand exemptions for vaccines and immunizations in general under the cover of religious freedom.

Steele made a motion to discharge HB 2036 from the House Health and Human Resources Committee Tuesday and move the bill directly to the House floor. Committee chairs have wide latitude over the bills they choose to take up in committee. House Health Chairwoman Amy Summers, R-Taylor, is a registered nurse, as is Vice Chair Heather Tully. One can understand why those two might not want to mess with immunizations.

Discharge motions are often used by the minority party to draw attention to bills that are not moving. Discharge motions are rarely successful. In this case, House Majority Leader Eric Householder, R-Berkeley, made a motion to table Steele’s discharge motion, which effectively puts the bill in legislative purgatory. The vote on the motion to table had 62 supporters, with 33 members voting with Steele against the motion.

A few columns back we talked about this small group of House Republicans. Some are experienced lawmakers, but many are new freshman delegates with Steele as sort of a de facto leader of this small group within the House Republican supermajority. I wrote then that this group could very well begin to flex its muscles in order to get far-right legislation moving or to halt or slow down the legislative process if they didn’t get their way.

On Tuesday, after the motion to table Steele’s discharge motion was adopted and after the debate and passage of Senate Bill 10 — the campus carry bill — Steele attempted to flex that muscle by making a motion to have bills read in full. It’s a non-debatable motion and used sometimes to slow down the legislative process but mostly used as a way to throw a temper tantrum.

The bill after SB 10 was not very long, and after that the House recessed until 8 p.m. that evening. Then the House Rules Committee — consisting of the leadership of the House’s committees — moved to place all bills on the House floor agenda to the House’s inactive calendar. It’s like another form of legislative purgatory for bills.

The next day on Wednesday, the House Rules Committee moved four of the shortest bills back to the House active calendar in anticipation of Steele continuing his demand to have bills read in full. During Wednesday’s floor session, Steele made a motion to remove his discharge motion for HB 2036 from the table, a motion that failed 14-84.

That’s right, between Tuesday and Wednesday, Steele lost more than half of his supporters. The message from House Republican leadership was received loud and clear, including by the new freshmen.

With the deadline looming yesterday for bills to be out of committees in order to meet the Crossover Day deadline Wednesday when bills must be passed by the house of origin, House leadership was prepared to keep bills parked as long as the body was being held hostage to Steele’s demands. Steele’s support shriveled on the vine, and without that there was no point in having bills read in full.

Again, the ins and outs of politics — even politics within the Republican supermajority — can be fun.